Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Unleashed- P11:SQL Server 2005 provided a number of significant new features and enhancements over what was available in SQL Server 2000. This is not too surprising considering there was a five-year gap between these major SQL Server 2008 is not as much of a quantum leap forward from SQL Server 2005 | 54 CHAPTER 3 Examples of SQL Server Implementations the most selected platform for R 3 and SAP application deployments more than 56 000 SAP application installations run on Windows which is more than all other platforms combined. Of these more than 23 000 SAP application installations worldwide are running with SQL Server as the RDBMS. In fact this billion company uses its own software for its internal ERP purposes completely deployed on the Microsoft SQL Server platform. As you can see in Figure SAP s ERP footprint is a three-tier architecture consisting of a variety of client types a horizontally scalable application server tier and a highly available high-performance database tier. FIGURE SAP multitier architecture with SQL Server as the database layer. The SAP multitiered client server architecture is composed of three levels Client Presentation Tier This tier supports SAP graphic user interfaces GUIs such as SAP GUI SAP WebGUI and other products that connect to the SAP NetWeaver Application Server using one of the supported interfaces. The client tier also includes applications to access SAP using Web Services. For example applications including smart clients and Microsoft Office applications can integrate SAP data such as when the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software is used with Web Services. Applications that use the SAP RFC interface are also part of the presentation tier. Especially in the Microsoft world connecting to the application tier via RFC became common with the SAP .NET connector which offers a bandwidth of .NET classes and methods that are mapped to SAP Business Application Programming Interfaces BAPIs that are accessible via RFC. Download from OLTP Application Examples 55 Application Tier This tier can contain multiple SAP NetWeaver Application Server instances. However it needs to contain at least one application instance. If multiple instances are used in one system each application instance is typically run on .
